The Biden administration publicly warned Wednesday that Russia might seek to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine as the White House rejected Russian claims of illegal chemical weapons development in the country it has invaded.
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This week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – without evidence – accused Ukraine of running chemical and biological weapons labs with US support. White House press secretary Jen Psaki called Russia's claim "preposterous" and said it could be part of an attempt by Russia to lay the groundwork for its own use of such weapons of mass destruction against Ukraine.
"This is all an obvious ploy by Russia to try to justify its further premeditated, unprovoked, and unjustified attack on Ukraine," Psaki tweeted Wednesday. "Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them."
The US for months has warned about Russian "false flag" operations to create a pretext for the invasion. Wednesday's warning suggested Russia might seek to create a pretense for further escalating the two-week-old conflict that has seen the Russian offensive slowed by stronger-than-expected Ukrainian defenders, but not stopped.
Dmitry Chumakov, a Russian deputy UN ambassador, repeated the accusation Wednesday, urging Western media to cover "the news about secret biological laboratories in Ukraine."
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby on Wednesday called the Russian claim "a bunch of malarkey."
The international community for years has assessed that Russia has used chemical weapons before in carrying out assassination attempts against Putin enemies like Alexey Navalny and former spy Sergei Skripal. Russia also supports the Assad government in Syria, which has used chemical weapons against its people in a decade-long civil war.
Asked by a Russian journalist about the claims, United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. "At this point have no information to confirm these reports or these allegations about these kinds of labs."
"Our colleagues at the World Health Organization, who have been working with the Ukrainian Governments, said they are unaware of any activity on the part of the Ukrainian Government which is inconsistent with its international treaty obligations, including on chemical weapons or biological weapons," Dujarric added.
Russia has a long history of spreading disinformation about US biological weapons research. In the 1980s, Russian intelligence spread the conspiracy theory that the US created HIV in a lab. More recently, Russian state media have spread theories about dangerous research at labs in Ukraine and Georgia.
The conspiracy theory about US-run labs in Ukraine has been picked up by Chinese state-controlled media and is now circulating in online message boards popular with COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and far-right groups in the US
Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King's College London, said there are no "US labs" in Ukraine. Instead, she said in an email, there are labs in the country that have received money through a US Defense Department threat reduction program.
"These are public and animal health facilities that are owned and operated by Ukraine," she said.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the conflict in Ukraine by telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday, the Kremlin said.
In a readout of the call, the Kremlin said Putin had told Bennett about Moscow's assessment of the third round of talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials that took place on Monday.
In London, British Foreign Minister Liz Truss called on the West on Thursday to get tougher with Russian President Vladimir Putin for shattering "the architecture of global security" over Ukraine and to tighten "the vice" of sanctions.
On the second day of a trip to the United States, Truss will tell an audience at the Atlantic Council think tank that after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the West must never again "allow such aggression to grow unchecked".
"We must rise to this moment. We must pledge that never again will we allow such aggression to grow unchecked. That means acting now. It means being tough – because we know that the costs will only rise if we don't," Truss said, according to her office.
Putin had assaulted "the rules by which we coexist – sovereignty, democracy, the UN Charter. He has shattered the architecture of global security. If we let Putin's expansionism go unchallenged it would send a dangerous message to would-be aggressors and authoritarians around the world," she said, describing the invasion of Ukraine as "a paradigm shift on the scale of 9/11."
Britain, which has sought to play a central role in the international response to the invasion, has been mostly in lock-step with the United States, matching many of the measures taken by Washington since Russian troops entered Ukraine almost two weeks ago.
Also on Wednesday, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said that the loss of power at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in Ukraine does not have any critical impact on safety.
"Heat load of spent fuel storage pool and volume of cooling water at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sufficient for effective heat removal without need for electrical supply," the IAEA said in a statement.
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